Sturdy trees grow awkwardly.
Thin wisps that flip in the
wind, malleable to its will,
stretch too-big hands to
strike the sun in
misplaced rage.
Their dance is jutting
and askew. They have
permanent blood that
stains your hands.
When you crack them in half,
they find a way to
stretch in resentment still,
idle to the earth’s death-wish,
until they quit, and bloom.
AI can never be as alive or as culturally deviant as we endeavor to be. It can never achieve our lived experiences, and so it does not have the power to take our voices away; it doesn’t understand. It sets a higher bar for all writers linguistically, but it will never take away the souls of the living. In the real world, it takes our jobs, and it reveals ever-darkening corners within corporations' greed. When it comes to independent artists, it advances us at a terrible cost.
AI, like most artists, is derivative. Its problem is that is all it is. Every poet is a cannibal and every artist a thief: however, that is not their defining factor. It shouldn’t be: derivative, fun artists from Bob Ross to Greta can Fleet can only be taken at face value and then thanked for their entries while others work to advance the craft. This is the same token familiarity of AI art (though a little off, as it doesn’t often fully understand the assignment yet), even at its most abstract—that is, before keeling off into the uncanny and most deceased-to-its-core to the point where its life is only breathed into it by its critic. AI art is inherently empirical; it cannot create new art that is not based in some way on some established mechanic.
At its best, its abstraction lacks soul; it can only advance its derivative nature before sprawling into abstractions that can only advance our art and challenge us to be better. At the same time, AI simply shows off what computers can do; it cannot demonstrate the limits of human capability because it is not human. Only its creators and interpreters can humanize whatever it produces.
Sweetened-up strings hold fast to your fingers—you hear resonance like a false harmonic when they unstick. You hammer wrought-iron fingertips into its long neck’s ebony; the vibration through your knuckles rings familiar and mechanical.
Punctuating your collective frustration, you draw the bow in a quick chop in front of the bridge. You peer through its f-hole (you’re intimate). Amidst breadth of dust hides a deceased Czech’s last name and a serial number tracing to an old tome. You blow into it, but nothing will ever escape its chambers.
Pizzicato feels like raindrops falling on your fingers. A little warped like you, it wears the grey gum of centuries; its pegs only budge after a thick coat of graphite or lipstick. Maybe she’s born with it—maybe it’s Maybelline.
In its satin-lined coffin are a tin of Pirastro rosin and a plastic tube keeping a humidifier nonsensically dry. On a velour bed, a rogue piece of music which had been pressed into the strings’ form after having the lid shut on top multiple times. Between a good bow and a heavy one that murders your knotty fingers, a picture of you and your little sister at a pumpkin farm in 1996.
It is a member of the family, its scroll a binding ketubah. Expensive like a marriage, the thought of losing it gives you anxiety not unlike a marriage. Its voice is close to Astrud Gilberto’s. Buying and selling it ends here, and it will be buried with you, like an ancient pet in its sarcophagus.
An early memory
of my Lithuanian
grandmother blowing
the warmth from
an egg with a straw
My longing for simple
crayon-waxed caresses
While watching her adeptly
etching with
all her affection
Beautiful litvak with
knowledge of Easter eggs
sharp as needles with which
she afflicted their plump
promise,
she could relate to them:
she had been stuck and
drained, too.
But she had survived it all.
—She won’t talk about
Those Things and That Time
but she cannot bring herself to speak about
anything else. She speaks in
bright crayons and toothpicks—
Margutis,
vibrant shell:
when you glue on a sequin,
you cover its wound,
and it can serve no purpose
anymore but to feel
vibrations:
the pulse of
living fingertips.
Margučiai,
vacant wombs:
though they’ve lost their warmth,
their colors breathe a certain life
from their little wooden bowl.
Let’s Eat Indoors Today
An aging art critic shuffled through the Tate, stomach rumbling, seeking something to chew on. Maybe the bubbled umber skin of Jeff Koons' Basketball-in-Tank, or, better, a steak carved from Damien Hirst’s Shark-in-Tank. It all gave off the same pretentious rubbery flavor, though, as the billion-dollar Matisse escargot that audiences flocked for—and that one didn’t even come with its own takeout box; not yet.
Giacometti's gaunt figures were far from hearty--the man craved something juicy, with rolls of flesh. He strode past some other name-droppings: plop plop, like a divine trail of colorful sugar buttons on a piece of waxed paper. A Miró to melt in his mouth! A writhing Bacon ensconced on a chaise: Bacon, who geschmacked of meat-as-murder, as if sparkling pork drippings roiled to life off the artist's scrumptious name onto a pan fashioned from stretched canvas. ‘Crispy,’ thought the critic with ravish, as he daydreamed how it would feel to gnaw the butchered ribs from Painting (1946).
The masters tantalized him, but these all neared expiration and had begun to emit a vinegared putridity, like the ambitious Hirstian feast the man ravenously devoured at the Royal Academy a few months prior.
Having almost given up hope for lunch, the nostril-piercing new-car aroma from a hyperslim Citroën brought saliva to the man’s lips at the touring Gabriel Orozco exhibition. The thing that really transported him, though, was the whiff of elevator chassis he barely could stoop into, as if it were made for him. It reminded him of the glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which made his stomach peal with a crack of thunder.
Piqued by the supple glory of its humble industrial genius, the man gobbled the chassis’ guts with vigor: gnawing wires, crunching bulbs copper and all while purveyors gawked at him in wonder. He ravished it down to its certificate of inspection: City of Chicago, last serviced 1993 (a great harvest year). It did not take the man very long at all to gulp down the piece’s innards as screws and nails dripped to the floor.
Sated, the man eked on through the exhibition, belly fuddled by the promise of dessert. He popped a cue ball that swung from the ceiling by a rope into his mouth as he passed an interactive piece involving a billiards table, snapping the ball’s cord as if he were plucking apple from branch. To slake his thirst, he slurped up the lotus pool in the middle of Ping Pond Table, to paddle-wielders’ horror and general malaise.
Newly fattened, nearly satisfied; our man caught the Tube home to a coffin-like apartment off Covent Road—his own chassis—while mulling over a snack-bag of Ai Wei Wei’s ceramic sunflower seeds. Perhaps the knotted black tape inside a ripped cassette copy of Ono’s Cut Piece would be an appropriate midnight snack: but home food is never that good, nor that expensive.
Someone asked,
“Could you write me
a book of poetry by hand?”
I gave it to them
but I bound it with the ropes
I use to bind me:
My torso hangs akimbo
like a masterpiece
in butchered pieces—
suspended—
some consider it
perverted; others
a knotted ballet—
I consider it a job,
binding my heart up
like any
self-proclaimed artist
or deviant
would.
You should
know by now
that I am bound
hard and fast, too,
within a proverbial Chinese
finger trap:
Push closer!
You yell,
but I tug
to pull away
like every interdiction
against our being
Here I am
hangin’ around
with-
in
the
rope
you
use
to
b
i
n
d
m
e
—yank!—